How (and How Not) to Cover the "History Wars"

The “History Wars” rarely seem to be out of the news these days. In The New Yorker, Emma Green has a long article that returns, yet again, to the controversy stirred up by former American Historical Association president James Sweet last year, when he criticized “presentism” in a maladroit column for the association’s monthly newsletter. Meanwhile, over at The Atlantic, George Packer writes that “American culture… is consumed with the most terrible subjects of the country’s history… In scholarship, works whose objective is to puncture our hopeful but misguided myths dominate.”

There are a number of things that bother me about stories like these. First, there are the mistakes and overkill that too often pop up in them. In the New Yorker story, Green writes of James Sweet that “as a white expert in African history, he has become part of a larger debate about whether someone should teach a history that is not their own.” Huh? I can’t think of a single serious scholar, even in the most radical, woke corners of academe, who argues that people should only teach (or write) “their own” history.

More seriously, it both amuses and annoys me that smart and observant journalists like Green and Packer tend to pose as outside observers with no influence over what “the historians” are doing. In many ways, they themselves have far more influence and power in the discipline than the average professor. The so-called “History Wars” did not simply well up unbidden from some deep source behind the walls of the ivory tower. They have, in large part, been driven by the coverage granted to certain books and scholars by publications like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and especially The New York Times. The internet, for all the utopian talk in the 1990’s of letting millions of flowers bloom, has in practice driven some of the strongest moves towards cultural centralization and uniformity seen in modern times. If The New York Times, the most influential news outlet in the world, decides to publish a piece about the James Sweet controversy, as it has done again and again and again, it will drive a lot of discussion. If there is “No Truce in the History Wars,” as the headline on one of these pieces declared, one reason (not the only one) is the Times’s coverage itself. The Times reviews only a tiny percentage of the history books published each year, and one would have to be very naïve indeed to think that its choices had no influence on the discussions that go on among historians. Would anyone care about the “1619 Project” if it had been published in almost any other newspaper?

Similarly, George Packer illustrates his argument about what he calls the “fatalism” in present-day historical scholarship (the belief “that nothing ever really changes”) by offering a single book as a particularly telling example: Jefferson Cowie’s Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power. Why this volume, among so many possible choices? It is a deeply researched, powerfully written piece of work, but one reason for Packer’s choice is probably that it received a much coveted (and very positive) review in the New York Times Book Review, which marked it as important and influential.

Even as he uses Cowie’s book to illustrate what he sees as a key trend in current scholarship, Packer misreads Cowie’s intentions, in two ways. First, he argues that Cowie casts Barbour County, Alabama, home of George Wallace, as typical of the United States as a whole—“the heart of America,” in Packer’s words. True, Cowie wrote that what happened in Barbour County “was not much different than what happened in the rest of the Black Belt, the South, or the nation.” But Cowie is hardly so foolish as to think that racist white resistance to federal power was equally strong in Barbour County and in San Francisco, or in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or identical in these places. His point is that the history of Barbour County illustrates in especially high relief certain patterns of behavior that could be seen operating throughout the nation (including in San Francisco and in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Secondly, Packer argues that stressing the deep continuities between the American present and some of the worst aspects of the American past amounts to “fatalism,” which is not simply a belief that nothing ever changes, but that nothing can ever be made to change. I don’t know Jefferson Cowie, but I presume he would take strong exception to this argument. Historians who stress deep continuities of this sort generally do not do so to encourage fatalism, but to show just how great the task can be to overcome the past’s mephitic legacies.

I have my own reservations about books like Cowie’s, and I agree with Packer that they can, in practice, instill a kind of fatalism despite the authors’ intent, or risk turning complex pieces of history into morality plays (I developed some ideas on the subject in this essay last year). But to make arguments of this sort, you have to engage with the works, closely evaluate their claims and evidence. Packer doesn’t really do this with Cowie. In fact, he calls Cowie’s claims “in one sense… incontestable.” He mentions a number of other American localities, and asserts their difference from Barbour County, but he doesn’t deal with the more difficult point about how the history of Alabama might reveal important patterns of behavior that also operated, with important local variations, on a national scale.

And this is the final reason I have problems with stories like these in the prestige mainstream media: they tend to focus on the politics in history books, rather than the history. Do historians have political motivations? Of course they do, and in some cases, to be sure, political motivations lead historians to make shoddy arguments and misread and distort evidence. But good historians, including most of those whom the Times and the Atlantic write about, do not do this. Their works are shaped not only by politics, but by complex, long-lasting and highly serious scholarly debates, and by their authors’ ongoing research. Good historians work very hard to craft their arguments, and frequently, in the course of writing their books, actually change their minds (its true!). They are motivated by much more than a desire to “puncture our hopeful but misguided myths.” Very little about the autonomous practices of scholarship gets into the overheated coverage of the “History Wars,” which gives readers a very distorted idea of how historians actually go about their craft. It encourages the idea that universities should prioritize “intellectual diversity” – i.e., hiring conservative scholars to balance out the left-wing ones – with little attention to the actual content and quality of scholarship. As current executive and legislative initiatives in Florida suggest, this idea can have very real, and potentially very harmful, consequences.